February 2009 Archives

Due to a combo of Microsoft 2007 and SanDisk Cruzer technology I lost the original blog that was intended to take this space. Ironic really as it was about the relentless march of technology, the overpowering nature of constant communication, and it was called blog will eat itself which is what eventually happened to it.

As a consequence I'm typing direct from my head to the blog site and avoiding any potential problems. The original stream of consciousness was spurred by the vast quantity of news-stories about Twitter. I joined Twitter around six months ago as I could sense that it was going to become big news and probably grow at the same rate as Facebook. I signed up initially to make sure I got my own name. Six months on I realise that most people use an alias or a nickname, which is the kind of payback I always get when I'm trying to be ahead of the curve.

Given that other people have written about it excessively I don't feel the need to explain it, this is despite the common consensus appearing to be that people don't really understand it or see the point. I understand that opinion and share it to a degree, but I like the idea of 140 character updates and it gives me the opportunity to be cryptic, which I love.

I'm following around 30 people - a mixture of people I know and people I'd like to know. In the latter group can be found the likes of Graham Linehan (creator of Father Ted & The IT Crowd) who seems to update on a very regular basis. As other more talented writers have pointed out it's interesting to see the updates of celebs and appears to be a further blurring of the lines between celebrity and reality, a true facet of the internet age.

Today's blog has been delayed.

In a bizarre and ironic episode I had written over 800 words about the blogosphere, about twitter, facebook, skype and the ever increasing number of communication portals available to us all in 2009.

I had titled the piece 'blog will eat itself' as a bad pun on a famous Stourbridge band I used to know (most of whom I'm back in touch with via facebook) and also because the endless spiral of electronic noise is ever evolving but revolves like infinity, around and around. That was probably the cleverest part of the piece.

Unfortunately as I was editing it this morning, my pc ate the document and despite all expert advice and the fact that it was originally on a portable memory stick, I can't currently find it. Consequently it was, and currently is, the blog that ate itself.

Having put so much effort into it, I'm still trying to recover it. Should this fail I may be heard screaming loudly in the streets, listen out for it as it may be all you hear from me this week.

PF

I've been busy. Frankly it's overdue; I was starting to get worried. Who wants to be under-employed during a recession? I would've preferred the frantically busy time not to hit during the half-term school holiday but rather this than not at all I guess.

The knock-on effect of suddenly being maniacally busy is that I'm unable to socially interact as much as usual. I was never that social, and nor am I now, however the effect of facebook and twitter has been to inadvertently make myself more communicative. I now stress if I haven't updated my links/status for days, this is despite not having the time to think about it - to be fair, few people seem to be doing much thinking when they post, but I'm not those people.

Being an unorganised chap I have compartmentalised most of my electronic activity. This blog gets updated weekly with a long-form 500 word type stream of consciousness, my other blog is supposed to be shorter, more frequent and random. Added to these I try to keep my twitter fairly pithy but intelligent (I usually fail); I like the fact that it can only be 140 characters (or whatever), and my facebook is the most random of all. Sadly the facebook seems to be most visible/well-read, they really work that site quite well.

Of course in a busy work-period all this forethought goes out of the window. I don't think I've updated any of the other blogs at all in the last week and I was struggling to find a subject for this one. Actually that's not true - I had about four streams of thought, but couldn't crystallise any of them in the time available, not concisely anyway. Not that this usually matters.

Consequently this blog is composed 'on-the-fly' as it were. I have frequently realised that my life is a series of questions. Many of these are ridiculous, random and (as I love alliteration) rhetorical. Usually they're not aired in public, only in my mind. Today I'm sharing them with you.

Occasionally they'll be given a back-up explanation but usually not, I'll let you draw your own conclusions. Owing to another busy day I'm starting this at 09.32 and will add to it as the day comes along and the opportunities or questions present themselves. Today, you share the noises that occupy my head.

It's a popular myth; in the future we'll all work 'smarter'. I'm not entirely sure when the future is supposed to be (tomorrow, next wk, year, decade, century) and the intentional ambiguity just leads me to realise that for 'smarter' we can actually substitute the word 'harder'.

I was given cause to think about this by the 'shock/horror' statistics used last week when most of us had to take a day-off from commuting. Apparently our very absence from the workplace causes the economy to suffer to the tune of many millions. These statistics never seem very scientific to me, just some random multiplication of number of people absent by average financial output per person. The latter must be somewhat difficult, if not impossible, to calculate as we don't all work on production lines; only in this instance could you say an absence amounts to a specific number of things that remained unpacked or unscrewed, etc.

As successive Governments have destroyed our manufacturing industry I'd imagine that the bulk of us actually now work in clerical or 'service' industries. If we don't turn up at work then we probably have to find a way to complete that work either at home or by cramming it into the next working day. On that basis I fail to see how the money has been lost to the economy.

For years now I've had the capacity to do a vast quantity of my work from my home, possibly as much as 80% of the same functions I could perform from commuting to any office. The bits you miss out on from not being physically present are things like being able to read your bosses body language when he/she's bawling you out and to be present at interminably long meetings which resolve nothing. In theory you could do the former by video link and the latter by audio conference (whilst enjoying a nap) but this seems not to happen at my level.

It probably began with 8 out of 10 cats. You remember the ones, those who expressed a preference for one form of canned mechanically recovered meat (plus water, ash*, copper sulphate) over another. They may have been the first to use statistical justification for advertising claims.

Since then it has clearly become law. One of my chief pleasures (OK, I should get out more) is trying to catch the amusing print in TV ads; it's a small point of amusement to discover that when 100% of women recommended a particular skin cream the study actually only involved 60 people. As the maxim goes, there are lies, damned lies and statistics - but 100% in bold type with a persuasive voiceover sounds a great deal more impressive than sixty random** women.

The other one to catch my eye was for Flora Buttery which was announced to 'taste better' than its rivals. The small print revealed that the study results were 48% vs. 45% with the remainder expressing no preference. Even worse the size of the sample (200) meant that the grand claim was based on just six people saying that they liked it better than Lurpak Lighter Spreadable. 14 people either couldn't tell any difference or couldn't care less, but that doesn't sell quasi-butter of course.

Of course it's all about price this year, which is fairly dull and negates the beauty of advertising which, in its purest form, is really about creating desire; the feeling that you need something, that your life won't be complete without it. When it comes down to price there's really no art-form involved, it's just about all the supermarkets hiring their own price comparison surveys and claiming to be cheaper on a range of products, yawn.

Now that genuine humour seems to have disappeared from our advertising the things that make the ad breaks interesting in 2009 are either great effects and technique or the cosmetic companies. Not content with manipulating the statistics, the purveyors of over-priced facial slop also like to create their own language. I have deigned to call it the compendium of cosmetic codswallop, you may know it better as boswellox.